Rationale

Real-time systems have evolved over the past decades in a relatively calm manner - performance has increased, one can say dramatically, but the main paradigms were pretty stable since the mid 80s. This has changed now. The big change that is moving into the embedded field is multicore - and that is not an adaptation of our current methods but a re-design from scratch in quite a few cases - notably of our way of thinking about real-time. Precisely this area of real-time embedded multicore has been a long-time focus of James Anderson's Real-Time Systems Group from the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, covering a wide range from multicore RT, embedded applications, testing to certification issues. OSADL and the Real Time Linux Foundation Working Group gratefully acknowledge Prof. Anderson's offer to host this year's workshop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Linux in embedded systems is well established, ranging from consumer electronics to network devices and increasingly industrial applications including safety related systems. The technological resources suitable for high-availability, real-time, and safety critical systems have been continuously expanding and improving - allowing to cover the entire development life cycle of industrial projects based on open-source tools. At the core of this development is the availability of stable operating systems with reliable real-time properties. Extending and improving these real-time properties of open-source RTOS is continuous research and development effort that OSADL documents in the form of the annual Real Time Linux Workshop.

Call for papers

Authors from regulatory bodies, academics, industry as well as the user-community are invited to submit original work dealing with general topics related to Open Source and Free Software based real-time systems research, experiments and case studies, as well as issues of integration of Open Source real-time and embedded OS. A special focus will be on industrial case studies and safety related systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Modifications and variants of the GNU/Linux operating system extending its real-time capabilities,

Abstract submission

Hints for the composition of the abstract

The purpose of the abstract is to provide reviewers with as much information as possible to estimate the relevance and the importance of the work. Although it is well conceivable that some part of the data are not yet available at the time of submission, enough information must be provided to make the given conclusion comprehensible.

In detail, we need i) a statement about the rationale of the research, ii) a description of how experiments, studies, observations etc. were carried out, iii) a summary of the results, and iv) a conclusion to what extent the results will change our current views - or at least have the potential to do so.

In consequence, sentences starting with "This paper will ...", "We want to find out ...", "We will write software that ...", "The results may show ..." etc. probably are not able to fulfill the above mentioned prerequisites for an acceptable abstract.

With the exception that we have not, at least not yet, defined an upper limit of the word count, Philip Koopman's "How to write an abstract" quite well describes our expectation.

Final paper to be included into the RTLWS14 Proceedings

Upon acceptance of an abstract by the RTLWS14 Program Committee, the author will be invited to submit a full paper in a form defined by https://www.osadl.org/paper.tgz. A detailed description of the editing and formatting process will be provided along with the notification email.

Venue

The workshop will be held October 18-20, 2012, on the beautiful campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most events will be held in the conjoined Sitterson Hall/Brooks Building, home of the UNC Department of Computer Science. The Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill was one of the first in the United States to be established as an independent computer science department. It was founded in 1964 by Dr. Frederick P. Brooks Jr. UNC-Chapel Hill is located within a region of North Carolina known as the Research Triangle, which encompasses the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill and surrounding communities. Duke University and North Carolina State University are also located within this area. Approximately 150 companies and institutions have facilities in the nearby Research Triangle Park. Included among them are companies like IBM and Red Hat, which are heavily involved in Linux-related development efforts.

Registration

In order to participate to the workshop, please register at the RTLWS14 registration page.